how they are. Saint Paul conceptualizes the solution in terms of God’s being as the ground of all because he creates the world. God creates and knows, and he communicates this knowledge to humans. Modern science offers another solution to this mystery of Being by mathematizing motion while ignoring processes. Processes, in terms of why they are as they are—the generation of plants, animals, and humans—are excluded from modern mathematical science, which deals only with mathematized processes that it can account for in the sense of how they “proceed.” Only mathematizable “motion” can be dealt with by mathematics. Modern science does not deal with nonmathematizable domains. Hence there is no possibility to account for human meaning, which cannot be integrated into the mathematical scientific project.
Once again, we are back where we started. In the current dominant view, we are aware we cannot understand the mysteries that science excludes from its sphere of investigation, and we also cannot know “nature” in terms of why things are as they are if we accept that scientific explanations are the only way to disclose what nature is. We can know nature only as a mathematical manifold; in other words, through only those aspects that science considers. Moreover, the progression of knowledge is relative to the methods of investigation. Science never pretends to disclose the meaning of the whole; it is interested in an accumulation of knowledge that gives scientists glimpses into the vast universe from its own methodological framework. As Werner Heisenberg expresses it, “We invariably encounter structures created by man, so that in a sense we always meet only ourselves.”11
To deal with the human questions that science excluded—in other words, questions regarding humans’ meaningful relation to the world, others, and their own Being—the Socratic questions—“What is justice?”; “What is human meaning?”; “What is good?”—became topics for the rational theology that Kant exposed as untenable. We are living in the world, where, once again, we cannot provide answers to the quandary of human existence with the methodology of modern science, and there is not any other “method” available.
Patočka’s suggestion is: If there is only situational human meaning, then meaning will have to be constantly reaffirmed through the Socratic elenctic and protreptic methods; through searching for new questions and answers with others by providing reasons that we can give an account for. In other words, to avoid the positing of an absolute meaning—be it via Platonic Ideas, God, history, or the eternal recurrence of the same—human finite meaning can only be situational, in other words, relative to the human finite situation.
OUTLINE OF CHAPTERS
In chapter 1, I discuss Husserl’s discomfort with the way formalized science is applied as “technique” without reflection upon the ground of this formalization. Husserl is concerned with this problem from the beginning of his work, and this concern continues as a leitmotif throughout his whole oeuvre. In his final work, he suggests that Europe is suffering from a profound confusion between method and the object of its investigation. Consequently, what is forgotten is the life-world; the ground from which generalization and subsequent formalization proceed.
In chapter 2, I consider Heidegger’s project, beginning with his opposition to neo-Kantianism, which reduced Kant to the status of an epistemologist only. His answer to Husserl and to neo-Kantianism is to rethink the Being of a questioner, a living being in the world. Heidegger also offers a different way to think about the mathematization of nature and modern technoscience through his discussion of the change from the ancient ta mathemata to the modern mathematical knowledge.
The topic of chapter 3 is the work of Arendt, who provides a different assessment of the changes to our understanding of the world, informed by Heidegger’s thought, which she constantly problematizes. Nevertheless, she retains Heidegger’s commitment to ask questions of “the tradition that is broken,” as she puts it.
In chapter 4, I consider Patočka. By renewing Husserl’s original “phenomenological motives,”12 Patočka provides a critique that can help us understand not only his own phenomenology, but also the manner in which the Husserlian critique of formal knowledge and the associated concept of the “Lebenswelt” continue in his work and are developed there in important ways that continue to have contemporary relevance. Patočka retains the Husserlian commitment to the importance of critical and honest responsibility for one’s own thinking, supplementing his reflections with Heidegger’s notion of the importance of a questioner who lives in the world. Husserl’s and Heidegger’s considerations are merged into Patočka’s own conception of asubjective phenomenology and his three movements of existence.
The nineteenth century brought to the fore disenchantment with the new natural science. Humans became aware that scientific objectivity brought many inventions that made human life easier, but they also realized that science is not equipped and does not aspire to solve the existential human problems that God had answered previously. Humans found themselves in the world without secure, transcendent meaning. Many writings document this disenchantment. It was Husserl who pointed out the problem of the sedimentation of knowledge, the substitution of formal reasoning for existential questions, and the shift in our perception of the world by addressing the reversal in our understanding of nature brought about by Galileo.
The path from Husserl to Heidegger and beyond blazed a trail for subsequent thinkers, who took up seriously Husserl’s critique of the formalization of sciences, turned into methodological techniques. In this book, I deal with three thinkers directly or indirectly influenced by Husserl’s work and its changed focus: Heidegger, Arendt, and Patočka. I will argue that despite seemingly different projects, the initial driving force of phenomenology—to examine taken-for-granted theses by going back to the things themselves—underlines all four philosophers’ undertakings.
CHAPTER ONE
CRITIQUE OF THE MATHEMATIZATION OF NATURE—FROM PHILOSOPHY OF ARITHMETIC TO THE CRISIS OF EUROPEAN SCIENCES
Edmund Husserl
The Logical Investigations signify [. . .] a beginning or rather a breakthrough. They were not written for anyone who is satisfied with his prejudices, for anyone who already has his philosophy, his psychology, his logic, his epistemology. For such a one they are a hollow “scholastic logicism” or some other sort of “ism.” They differ, however, essentially from other philosophical proposals through the fact that they have no intention of being anything more than probes which attempt to get at the primary presuppositions of the sense of the Logos and thereby of all science, and to clarify these presuppositions in specific analyses. The Logical Investigations are [. . .] far removed from any attempt to persuade the reader, by way of some sort of dialectical tricks, to accept a philosophy that was for the author already an accepted fact.
—Edmund Husserl1
I seek not to instruct but only to lead, to point out and describe what I see. I claim no other right than that of speaking according to my best lights, principally before myself but in the same manner also before others, as one who has lived in all its seriousness the fate of a philosophical existence.
—Edmund Husserl2
The purpose of this chapter and the following chapter is to establish a background to my discussion of Arendt’s and Patočka’s critiques of science, which is, according to them, one of the sources of existential crisis in today’s societies.3 In this chapter, I will consider Edmund Husserl’s critique of the natural sciences. In order to understand the trajectory of Husserl’s thinking, I will start
